


sing us to the end of love

by driftingechoes



Category: Given (Anime), Given (Manga)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, During Canon, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, References to Depression, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:42:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25478614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/driftingechoes/pseuds/driftingechoes
Summary: A four-part series about love, loneliness, and mourning, expanding on the themes of the manga extra "Strawberry Swings" through the perspectives of Hiiragi, Shizusumi, Yuki, and Mafuyu.Meetings and partings; joy and sadness; promises made and broken; hands held and let go of; love and its shadows; whether saved or unforgivable, whether or not you want to forget, this is all that we are given.
Relationships: Kashima Hiiragi/Yagi Shizusumi, Satou Mafuyu/Yoshida Yuuki
Comments: 8
Kudos: 39





	1. Hiiragi.

**Author's Note:**

> A short series of interconnected ギヴン vignettes of my personal headcannons filling in the blanks of and developing the ideas in the original anime/manga. I tried to stay as close to the canon material as possible, but some minor details may diverge for convenience.

_Kashima Hiiragi wants to be forgiven. Doesn't matter by whom, he just wants to be forgiven. More than anyone, he wants Mafuyu to forgive him._

Hiiragi had known everything. And he had done nothing, until there was nothing left to be done.

But in the end, what was it really that he had known?

Spring. Hiiragi watched it all happen. He first saw them kiss when they were 14. It was a small, hesitant thing newly born, a flutter of a caress, on the swing-set beneath the cherry trees of a quiet park where they had been waiting for Hiiragi and Shizusumi. When Yuki had been the first to pull away, Mafuyu had reached up to trail his fingers along the skin of Yuki's cheekbones. Hiiragi was too far to hear what, if anything, was spoken between them, but he turned his head away from the two as Yuki touched the inside of Mafuyu's wrist. 

October. They were 15. It was nearly the end of lunch break when Hiiragi passed by a half-open door, where he heard an unmistakable voice murmur, 'So what if they do? Let them see.' 

The late afternoon spilled golden through the crack of the open door and into the hallway. Hiiragi glanced in and saw Yuki lean Mafuyu gently against the desk, as the two stood alone in an empty classroom sun-drenched with burning light and flooded with stark shadow. Mafuyu was faced away from the door; Yuki's hand caressed the back of his neck. As Hiiragi paused in surprise at their conspicuousness when they melted deeper into the kiss, Yuki's gaze flickered up to seize Hiiragi's, who was half-hidden behind the door, with a glint in his eye, unperturbed and unmoving from the slow embrace. 

Hiiragi quickly looked away, retreating back into the hallway, Yuki's expression rising in his mind along a darkening foreboding. 

It was a gaze different from when Hiiragi had looked at him with guilty eyes that evening nearly two years ago, and it was a kiss different from the spring swinging beneath the cherry trees. 

Up until then, Hiiragi had at times swayed back and forth in anxious uncertainty: did Mafuyu know yet? What would happen if he didn't? Would it make no difference either way? Does it even matter? Sometimes he convinced himself Yuki had told Mafuyu after all; other times, it was obvious to him that he clearly had not. As he watched them, he was soon wavering: should I be the one to tell? 

Here was what Hiiragi had known for the past two years: Only a piece of paper folded up neatly, blank side up, and tucked inside a tattered old music book with crinkled pages. 

It had been the summer when they were 13. Hiiragi had just been bought his first guitar, after a year of enviously watching Yuki strum away steadily at his, with an unexpected patience and dedication that Hiiragi had ever known him to reveal around Mafuyu. The simple joy and mystery of the music he saw from his face had moved Hiiragi to curiosity. After acquiring his own guitar, what began as mere childish imitation and – though he would not admit it to himself until years later – a means to get closer to Yuki, had begun to transform into something more: Hiiragi was slowly falling in love with the music itself. 

He had been in the kitchen with a pile of beginners' music books spread around him that he had retrieved from Yuki's room across the street. Yuki and Mafuyu had drifted out on their own that morning, just the two of them, as they sometimes did. Hiiragi knew that Yuki didn't like anyone touching his second-hand books when he wasn't around, but since he had promised to lend him some last week, Hiiragi invited himself to them on his own that day. 

Without thinking, Hiiragi unfolded the paper that stuck out from the the page where the book fell open on the table. But - huh? - wait a moment. What... was this? A medical... record...? Or...?

What were these words? They were ones which simply did not match up with the name that was printed at the top of the page. This paper... was a single mistuned string that did not accord with the collective harmony of the others that Hiiragi thought had constituted "Yuki Yoshida": discordant, cacophonous, a reverberating note that jarringly disrupted all that he'd understood. 

For the rest of the day, Hiiragi paced back and forth in his room until evening. Then from outside his window that opened toward the road, Mafuyu's soft laughter swept quietly up from the sidewalk, followed by Yuki’s rougher, bolder one, two interwoven voices which together was a single sound, a single harmony of complimenting opposites. 

Hiiragi looked across the street and saw them walking toward the Yoshida house, Yuki's arm slung easily across Mafuyu's shoulders in the effortless fit of their bodies together. He watched them part ways and wave good-bye. 

He couldn't bring himself until evening to knock on Yoshidas' door, clutching that music book with the paper carefully folded back inside it. Yuki opened the door; he must have already noticed. He stepped outside onto the porch and clicked the door closed behind him. This was to be a short conversation, he dictated. As he had a right to, thought Hiiragi guiltily. 

Beneath the lingering heat of day, the amber and indigo dusk rustled an autumn breeze across the trees. Cool blue shadows fell across Yuki in sharp slants, clashing with the warm, burnt orange light that shifted across his face like angular rays rippled by waves onto a shallow ocean floor. Would that surface ever crumble and fall away to a deep ocean, an abyssal plain, where no light could reach at all? 

Without meeting his eyes, Hiiragi handed him the book. The silence, punctuated only by whispering trees and tittering birdsong, stretched on with strain until Hiiragi relented. 'Does Mafuyu know?' he mumbled as he shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at the slowly moving light on his shoes. 

Yuki leaned against the door with a self-possession even in his evident hesitancy. 'Not in these kinds of words,' he said, now holding the folded paper in his hands. ~~Psychiatric evaluation~~. Of course. Even Hiiragi and Shizusumi knew that Yuki had his quiet, distant moods sometimes. Of course Mafuyu was more familiar than anyone with his every ebb and flow. But, was Hiiragi mistaken, or was this not something else entirely? 

'Are you going to tell him in... these kinds of words?' Hiiragi pressed, finally looking up at Yuki. ~~Persistent depressive disorder.~~

He had a complicated expression on his face – one Hiiragi had never seen before, and did not know how to decipher. Always, even as children, he seemed to have endless hidden corners that Hiiragi could never seem to reach. ~~Risk factors: Paternal family history of suspected undiagnosed MDD.~~ Yet why did it feel like even now, Yuki could see _him_ so clearly? 

'Please don't tell anyone,' Yuki finally said, in a tone of uncharacteristic formality and caution. 'Please,' he repeated more firmly, 'Please stay out of this.' And surely he knew that Hiiragi would do whatever he asked (was it trust or arrogance that made him so sure?), a secret taken to a grave where there it would reach its expiration date. 

A secret that would spill itself like ink and gush forward staining everyone within reach, with an unshakeable grasp that would nearly suffocate all of them. A secret that felt like it would be a permanent disgrace on Hiiragi's existence, that nearly four years later would make him want to sink to his knees and beg for forgiveness from those silent bones now turned to ash for having kept it until the end.

For weeks afterward Hiiragi thought that his new knowledge would change everything. He thought that now he would be able to hear clearly the mistuned note and its dissonance ringing. 

But he never was able to hear it in the way he expected. Apart from the disappearance of the tattered music book from Yuki's bookshelves, he found that nothing at all had changed. Yuki was as he always was -- intense, vibrant, dynamic, his mercurial moods with the occasional gleam of upset or tiredness in his eyes stopping short of harm to those who surrounded him. Amidst his only half-serious clashes with classmates and friends, Hiiragi would come to realize how careful Yuki had always been with everyone around him, and especially with their circle of four who were closest.

Time had flowed on in this way. **Yuki and Mafuyu were a law unto themselves.**Hiiragi watched as they grew ever closer, naturally and unhesitatingly as trees entwining their growing roots to support the branches expanding towards open skies. As they did so, a wordless foreboding gradually began to creep into Hiiragi. Was it roots, or vines after all, yet to grow thorns, that were binding them? 

But on that late October afternoon two years later, watching Yuki kissing Mafuyu on his open mouth in an empty classroom, Hiiragi was struck by the force of Yuki's gaze that seized him from across the room. Because there was new danger, a challenge in Yuki's eyes, a sharply intense warning: 'Stay out of this.' Of course Yuki had known all along what Hiiragi was thinking: because he had always saw through him, straight to the bone. 

Still, Hiiragi watched as Mafuyu continued to draw boundaries when on school grounds and shrink away from the casual closeness that was so natural when it was just the four of them. When there were people whispering in the hallways or at the school entrance, Mafuyu would often retreat when Yuki reached to hang his arms around his shoulders. To an outsider, it would look like Mafuyu pushing him away. But Hiiragi knew Mafuyu; he knew his fear that Yuki would no longer be accepted by his friends and classmates if they too brazenly stepped across an invisible line together. He knew, unconsciously, that Mafuyu too felt the need to protect Yuki from some nameless, unknown hurt.

In the end, Mafuyu failed to protect Yuki from the only thing that could hurt him beyond anything else: Mafuyu himself.

Standing by while they had their first and last fight, and walking away from the subway station when it was over, Hiiragi had convinced himself that it was just a childish fight that every couple has to go through, ignoring the voice that told him Mafuyu and Yuki were not like 'every other couple'. Ignoring the foreboding that had been stacking up inside him all this time.

It will be fine, he told himself. They'll be okay. They will be okay because, together, they are one sound that could never split apart.

It was two days later that Hiiragi finally heard the jarring, discordant, cacophonous strings ringing in his ears, in everyone's ears, that he had expected to hear over three years ago. And when he saw Mafuyu at the funeral, the last time he would see him for nearly an entire year, Hiiragi found out what it sounded like for someone else's heartstrings to break even louder than his own. He discovered that it was not the ringing that was unbearable, but the impenetrable, suffocating, choking silence that comes after the sudden snap.

If Hiiragi had just warned him; if he had said something, anything, would it have turned out differently?

Kashima Hiiragi had known everything. He had watched it all happen. But he had done nothing, until there was nothing left to be done.

That is the story of what he wanted to be forgiven for.

So in the end, what was it really that he had known?

Maybe it was everything, or maybe he had known nothing at all. Maybe he was an outsider all along; a bystander to the story of two people ripped apart. He thought he had understood Mafuyu; but he realized that his friend's grief was always going to be different from his own, he who had only ever watched, and never experienced that love enveloped in sanctity that he had been witness to.

In the days, months, and years following, Hiiragi often wondered why Yuki had tucked away that piece of paper in his dead father's music book of beginners' chords. During the months when he had played with Yuki and Shizusumi in their band and listened to Yuki write and scribble away and rewrite his lyrics, sometimes he thought he'd glimpse the connecting strings between these two things, only for it to slip away from him wordlessly.

But as he continued to play music, always he felt that he was coming closer to understanding. As he continued to play music, always he felt that he was somehow getting closer to forgiveness.

This isn't a story with a happy ending, not really. But it is one that must go on; one in which Kashima Hiiragi now cherishes more than ever the person here with him now, the shoulder that he has always soaked his tears in, the hands that have always been there to hold him, the person with whom he wants to continue the story with. 

A story not just in which two people were torn apart, but one in which four people were brought together from childhood, whose sounds will always echo in one another's songs. That is the story of how Kashima Hiiragi lives on, whether or not he will ever truly forgive himself.

.

.

.

.

.

.

_you were a presence full of light upon this earth  
_ _and I was a witness to your life and its worth._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I still cannot decide whether the plot contrivance in the middle felt a little artificial to get to where I wanted it. I have also discovered that I am hopeless at writing endings. I have a long way to go, and it pains me that I will never be able to perfectly convey the haunting feeling that 'given' has left in me. Please let me know your thoughts. 
> 
> Please also comment and share within our small but growing 'given' community if you enjoyed this :) My favourite parts are yet to come. There are lines and passages in the coming chapters that I am particularly proud of, so please look forward to those.
> 
> The chapters are all paired up with each other, so chapter 2 (Shizusumi) is really the part 2 to this chapter. It will be up in a few days. Chapters 3 (Yuki) and 4 (Mafuyu) will be up next week.


	2. Shizusumi.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are many different kinds of love in this world, and each one has its own name.

Shizusumi saw how Hiiragi was always looking at Yuki. From his admiration and emulation, worry and concern, joy and infatuation, Shizusumi saw it all. 

When Hiiragi would scan Yuki and Mafuyu's faces when he thought they weren't looking, at their entwined fingers, their bodies leaning towards each other like two trees growing from shared roots, what was it he had been searching for? At first Shizusumi briefly thought it was simply envy. But he also saw that there was something more than that, something Hiiragi never spoke of, a thing unspoken which he would not discover until he realized that Hiiragi was not as bewildered as he was when they suddenly became three instead of four. 

Shizusumi knew Hiiragi was a little bit in love with Yuki. 

There are many different kinds of love in this world, and each one has its own name. With time, Shizusumi understood what it meant for Hiiragi when he looked at Yuki, understood it better even than Hiiragi himself. 

Kashima Hiiragi felt seen by Yuki Yoshida. He felt that Yuki saw him for how who he was, who he wanted to be seen as, and all the greatest possibilities of who he could become; that in his gaze was an energy that drew him in closer in an immediate and unhesitating way that Hiiragi thought he had never encountered from anyone else before. 

When Hiiragi had announced he was buying a guitar, when he proclaimed his intentions to be in his band, Yuki would look at him and quirk his mouth into that smile that said, of course you can; of course you're a musician; of course this is who you are. A smile that, at the same time when it said, of course you are _you_ and of course that's enough, was simultaneously an affectionate provocation that challenged, of course you can show me how much more you could _become_. Hiiragi must have believed at one point that, except for Mafuyu, this energy was just between the two of them. 

The truth was, Shizusumi inadvertently felt that way around Yuki too. In truth, he knew that Hiiragi too eventually realized that that was Yuki's gift, his magic; that he made everyone feel this way. They all wanted to be seen by him, and wanted to be around that electricity. 

It was part of who he was. Without even trying, he simply saw clearly and truly the people around him. Perhaps everyone who knew Yuki fell a little bit in love with him. 

Yuki was magnetic. Entranced by that gravitational pull, his classmates would draw towards him as satellites around the sun, and he had the personality to make them want to stay – teasingly playful, enigmatic yet inviting, fiery yet considerate, confrontational yet not quite aggressive, domineering yet not quite oppressive. 

Of course, so too did he at times clash with that very crowd, albeit only half seriously. Conflict was not unknown to him, and there were other days when he would hold himself slightly aloof. It was only through their band practices that Shizusumi glimpsed, amidst the pure exhilaration of music, the tumultuousness that Yuki held inside himself that he would only spill outward within self-imposed limits. Although Shizusumi could never put it into words, this was how he discerned that Yuki seldom acted out of any of the anger that society expected of its boys; rather, it was unexpectedly out of a certain sadness, an inexplicable fear that only now, in the afterwards, that Shizusumi could begin to comprehend. 

In their last two years of junior high, rumours began circulating, at first no more than a whisper that eventually grew into an audible buzz, about Yuki and Mafuyu. Yuki lost a few friends during that time, those who scrambled away after clumsily mistaking his magnetism towards them as a reaching for something more. There was only one time when someone dared bad-mouthing Mafuyu to Yuki's face, and, though Yuki had minor scuffles in the past, that was the only time he faced the school's serious reprimand for a violent altercation.

After that, things quieted down and the rumours became merely an open secret among students. When the dust settled, more classmates still stuck by him than left through it all. That was the sheer force of Yuki's magic. Among those who knew him, not just those who looked on from behind the distorting screen of gossip and hearsay, there was an tacit and unexpectedly astute perception that it was not even that Yuki "liked guys"; it was simply that Yuki liked _Mafuyu_ , in whatever bodies either of their souls would take on in any of their reincarnations, and that was all there was to be said. 

Even though Hiiragi saw firsthand how people had bent themselves around him, saw how he wasn't the only one who was hopelessly captivated, those early years of believing he was the only one had impressed itself onto his mind even as he knew it not to be true. When Yuki's eyes were turned away, a part of Hiiragi always wanted to say, 'Look at me. I like it when you see me,' not yet fully aware that it was Shizusumi who was the one who was looking at him all along, who saw him and never stopped seeing him for a single instant. 

Because here is another truth: despite that Hiiragi thought he knew everything, despite that he thought he saw it all - though he might have come close - he was never able to see Yuki with reciprocal clarity. Yuki saw him, but Hiiragidid not see Yuki, not completely, and perhaps he did not need to in order to feel the admiration and idolization he did towards him. It was love, but its name was not the one that could have fulfilled Hiiragi for all the days to come. 

Shizusumi never doubted, even now, that Mafuyu was the only one who could really see Yuki. When Yuki looked at Mafuyu, he found himself met with equal understanding as he gave out.

In Mafuyu's eyes, Yuki Yoshida found truth. In seeing each other, and accepting all that they saw, they together slowly and carefully pronounced the name of the love that could have sustained them for all the rest of the days of the earth itself. 

That is, Shizusumi reflected, according to what love means to Hiiragi that he has since unconsciously adopted as part of his own definition: to see and to be seen with an unflinching acceptance.

Still, out of all the forms and synonyms for love, Yuki and Mafuyu surely could have pronounced them all. Ultimately, maybe that was enough. Maybe that is all anyone can ask for of a single lifetime; as painful as it is, how could anyone ask for anything more? 

And yet... at this moment, here and now, Shizusumi felt Hiiragi's breathing in sync with his own as they lay here together past midnight, after Hiiragi had fallen asleep in the middle of writing lyrics for their next song. Yet... Shizusumi could not help but ask for it all: not just one more day together, but a lifetime that would stretch into decades. Maybe it was selfish to ask for more than one more day of this, to ask for all days, every day. Amidst the stunning precariousness of the earth, maybe it was arrogant to demand the world to let him be by his side, together, for even one moment more. Call it arrogance, or call it love, call it a hopeless inability to learn lessons from grief: perhaps it was all the same either way, each being another stroke collectively forming the word beyond words that had no end, that would ceaselessly sound across their lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you have discovered by now, despite the chapter title, this was more about Yuki than Shizusumi. I did not feel familiar enough with Shizusumi from the canon to do much more with his character. However, he is a person who seems to have very wise eyes from which to observe the other three, so that is the role I chose for him.
> 
> Truthfully, I am not satisfied with the sentences I chose to end this chapter because they feel rather abrupt and awkward, but I hope that it was all still worth your time to read. 
> 
> There may appear to be something of a contradiction between something in this chapter and the previous one: if Yuki and Mafuyu saw each other truly, how could Mafuyu not have known the precise extent of all that went on in Yuki’s head? I hope the next two chapters can both clarify and complicate this paradoxical situation. But rather than giving clear answers, I want to illustrate how complex and ambiguous the relationship is between depression/mental illness and someone’s identity. In my humble view, although mental illness is an inseparable part of someone’s identity and experience of the world, it is not necessarily an integral part of someone’s most true and most real self. It is also possible to see someone’s darkness or inner conflicts without knowing or needing to put a clinical label on it. Please look forward for more of this difficult topic in the next chapter, which might be my personal favourite.


	3. Yuki.

_Didn't give me time to say goodbye in the way that I wanted to  
_ _So honey, close your eyes and stay like you're supposed to do  
_ _Don't you wanna give me time to write another song for you?_

Yuki Yoshida always thought that loneliness was a selfish feeling.

Everyone, he believed, has a secret name. It is one that no one, not even yourself, can ever really pronounce.

For a long time, he thought that his secret name was the small, lonely circle of darkness buried deep inside himself.

It had been there in one form or another for as nearly long as he could remember. As a child, he assumed that everyone had one inside them. He held this to be true even as he grew up, except that other peoples' usually originated from a definable moment, person, or event.

For him, it started as an unobtrusive little grey cloud that simply made itself known one cloudless day. Easily brushed away into the distance at first, as he emerged from childhood, it suddenly started and never stopped darkening until it was a perfectly round, perfectly small sphere of heavy grey that he carried around in his chest and in his head. It had no cause whatsoever: it had not a single reason to be there, but there it was, an unwelcome resident, having invited itself in and having never left.

The first little grey cloud was nothing more than a miscast weather forecast: sometimes when he looked up at the clear skies he would wonder, why does it feel like a grey day inside me of me today? But, easily dispersed, he would simply wave it away and ignore its trivial tug. When he discovered that the small boy next door had clouds stuffed in his head and smoke in his mouth because of the bruises his father gave him, so too did Yuki help him, ever so gently, chase those clouds away as well -- all so that he could hear Mafuyu speak to him in that soft voice of his that Yuki found he wanted to always hear, now and forever onwards. 

Then a small, unshakeable shadow fell across him in the dusk of his childhood. 

Everyone seemed to say that boys who cast deeper shadows were angry little creatures, who would grow up to be angry men who gave away bruises like Mafuyu's father had. 

But for Yuki, it was not anger that flashed its teeth when the storm rolled in, a rumbling tsunami that never sought to destroy the shore. His shifting moods were just that: fluctuations of his inner atmosphere that formed the dynamism, vibrancy, and electricity that drew others close. Even without his unwelcome shadow-guest, that much about him would not have changed. 

For him, the shadow was simply this: a darkness lurking beneath the surface, often nearly indiscernible. At its worse in the middle of the night, it was a slow, tired sinking downward; a small aching sadness tugging at his insides; a suddenly bleak, directionless, pathless landscape; a dissolution of the self that wondered if it should meet what was beyond the boundaries of the light. It was a confusion, it was a guilt for feeling so.

Collectively, it was the question: What if I followed that darkness into the lightless horizon? Would it be better if I did? Is it not so easy to step over that hazy threshold? After all, it is so tiring sometimes to take even one more step forward in this world. This was it at its worse, felt as a constant, incessant humming that at times grew louder before it retreated again to an almost imperceptible reverberation as he recalled that it would lead away from Mafuyu, away from his friends who were waiting for him where the light was.

Yet in no uncertain terms, his life was filled with joys, and he embraced every drop of it regardless - or perhaps _because -_ of his driftings beneath the surface. Every year following after he met Mafuyu – then Hiiragi, then Shizusumi, then discovered music, discovered art -- became the new happiest year in his memory. In every year he encountered new joys, watched Mafuyu lift his head a little higher and laugh a little more often, strummed new melodies from his own fingertips that seemed to echo the beat of his heart, and suddenly he was shown the path forward as an unquestioned truth beneath clear skies -- even though his insides were always dimmer than the outside. This was not a matter or mania or polar extremes; it was simply the heart of one responding to the love and art that reminded him which direction the dawn was, and the genuine will to love in return. 

If we can understand that two states of being - love and darkness - were felt intensely and simultaneously within one person, then we can begin to glimpse the enigma that was Yuki Yoshida.

Because here is one more piece to the paradox: 

No one ever tells about how much depression feels like fear. No one ever tells about how it feels like a dreadful knowledge. No one ever tells about how sometimes, in a certain slant of light, its contours can shape into understanding. 

That day by the seaside, leading Mafuyu onward across the blazing, brilliant, half-frozen winter sky, the symphony of waves, wind, and sea birds filled their ears, and a sadness like aching stirred in his chest. Let us stay a little longer. Let this not disappear. Let not this beauty, this safety, this feeling of being _home_ ever fade. Let us hold onto this moment for a minute more. Two. Four. Five more minutes. 

_'I won't forget this moment even if we don't spend another five minutes here._ ' Mafuyu said, without a single doubt or hesitation in his voice.

_'You'll remember in one year. You'll probably even remember in five years. But you won't even think about it much in ten years, I bet.'_ Closing his eyes, Yuki spoke these words like a premonition. If Mafuyu's hand in his was an irrefutable truth, then so was this. 

Sometimes, during beautiful, dazzling moments like these, an undefinable loneliness settled inside him. He did not know whether it was his present loneliness, or the premonition of a lonely future (it was funny how the future felt so much like nostalgia). He could not even tell whether it was his loneliness, or Mafuyu's. 

Am I ever going to lose you? Are you ever going to leave? Are you - or Hiiragi, or Shizusumi - ever going to want _me_ to leave? I don't deserve any of you, but please don't leave me. 

_Your eyes never waver when you look at me, so why do I feel afraid that I'm not enough for you? When, just every once in a while, you flinch from an unexpected noise even after you laugh at yourself for it, why do I feel that I've completely failed at brushing away those smoke and clouds that had been suffocating you?_

_You never lean away on days when I suddenly fall quiet when we’re alone, so why do I fear that you'll walk away while I'm trying not to sink into a dark ocean far away from you? You've never retreated from any part of me with all the storms that you know, without being told, sometimes rumble near, so why does the guilt set in that I've hurt you somehow?_

_You've never left my side, so why do I sense, with an overbearing homesickness of something precious that has been - or will be - lost, that you and everything I love will one day slip away?_

Leaping through the rain of spring downpours, carrying Mafuyu home after he scrapped his knees; lounging languidly about in the hazy summer heat with melting popsicles dripping down their wrists; wandering directionless, hand in hand, through the city streets and crowded metro stations; swinging in the park beneath the gingko trees; sitting in the living room while he fumbled away at his guitar as Mafuyu listened with his closed eyes and a faint smile. 

In their last year of junior high, kissing underneath the stairs by the roof and in the hidden sunlit corners; fingers tangled in each other's hair, alone in Yuki's room after school; hands slipping under ribs; discovering what it meant to _want_ , and to be met with an equal need reaching out to teach his touches both passion and patience; feeling Mafuyu's breath lightly skimming across his collarbones; midnight conversations and sneaking out at night just to breathe the cool open air together; or to drink their first drops of alcohol one night in the park, joined by Hiiragi and Shizusumi, and discovering that Yuki was the first to grow tipsy as the night dissolved into laughter and slowly spinning stars. 

How dearly he held onto each passing moment; and how desperately he wanted to enshrine this happiness. How fiercely he wanted to protect it, from the decay of time, from the fading of memories, from himself. 

How selfish a feeling was loneliness when one loves and is loved so. What irrational, inexplicable guilt weighs even heavier. 

Entering high school, he unconsciously realized where that nearly inaudible, lonely shadow-sound was coming from: it must be from the silence of enclosing these feelings, from not making that darkness known for what it was in its entirety. It was of not knowing how to articulate a secret name that he himself did not know how to pronounce. If he could only say it; if he could only share what it was in a way that wouldn't be a burden, in a way that wouldn't cause a bruise. 

Maybe the answer would be found in the exhilaration, the freedom, the possibilities in music. In music, mingled with untarnished beauty, he thought he found glimpses of the name of his darkness, one stroke of a letter at a time. And when the shadow reared its head, the music was a release. It was what he used to understand this thing buried inside him. In the act of creation, something was always trying to make itself known. 

He wanted to write a song for Mafuyu, a song that would help him understand all of this, to understand what Yuki himself did not, of how love and shadows could never seem to be separated in his heart. 

He had always known that Mafuyu loved music. Sometimes when he mused aloud about the songs he was trying to write, he caught from the corner of his eye a certain expression on Mafuyu's face, as if he had something to say. Yuki suspected he knew what it was: but he wanted Mafuyu to say it himself. He knew what Mafuyu wanted to ask, but he was waiting for him to trust in his own sound, his own voice. He did not want his sound to drown Mafuyu's. 

He knew Mafuyu wanted to write a song together, but never neither did have the time to say it out loud. If he had only said what he wanted, if Mafuyu had assured him that Mafuyu's sound was not going to be drowned by his, then Yuki was ready to unhesitatingly embrace Mafuyu in all of it: the band, the music, the song that he was trying to write, everything, everything.

Winter. Darker days descended and stretched into months. Like a wind-up carousel, Yuki whirled around school, band practice, and work. His smile flashed as brightly and fiercely as ever around his friends and co-workers who surrounded him. He poured himself into the music, which he now pursued seriously; he knew with clarity that he wanted to take it further, that he and Hiiragi and Shizusumi had the talent to take it where they wanted. But there was something else in it too: the shadows were lengthening, and not wanting to Mafuyu to see it in his eyes, not wanting him to carry that burden, not now, the music was the only thing that made it better. 

It was getting bad in his head. The guilt of feeling Mafuyu's confusion from a distance, and the emptiness when he would go days without seeing him, only made it worse when the lightless horizon beckoned. If he only he could capture it in music, if only he could communicate it that way, if only he could say it aloud... 

'I'll give up music. You know I would do anything for you!' 

Yuki reached out to grasp Mafuyu before he slipped away, to rest his trembling fingers along the slope of Mafuyu's shoulders and the curvature of his bones upon which Yuki's hand had always fit in a perfect match. He had to say something, anything, to make him stay for a moment longer. Please trust me. Please don't leave. I have always been selfish. I let myself be a burden. I hurt you. 

Mafuyu was the only person he could see in the crowded metro station. Trying to peer through the haze and the nearly palpable shadows intruding upon the edges of his vision, he strained to hear the reverberations of what Mafuyu had really been saying beneath his outburst of anger that had stunned Yuki. 

If he could only close his eyes and pause for a few minutes, he would hear it clearly as he had always heard Mafuyu clearer than anyone else. He could only hear in this suspended moment, what Mafuyu was saying right now: _Am I not enough for you? Do you love me? Are you leaving me behind? Do you not trust me as much as I have always trusted you? I can be strong for you too. ~~Please talk to me.~~_ _It hurts that I know you're keeping something from me. It hurts that you can't share your hurt with me. I've shown you my despair; will you not show me yours in its entirety? ~~I love you~~._

Yuki could hear it faintly, but only through a frantic static. A static that broadcasted one part of the message louder than all the others: I'm hurting because of you. 

_Am I not enough for you?_ Not knowing that he was enough; Mafuyu had always been enough; Mafuyu had saved Yuki so many times, in so many ways, without even knowing. 

_Do you love me?_ How could Yuki fail to make Mafuyu understand how precious he was? Loving Mafuyu was as natural as having a beating heart -- does it even need to be said? How does one describe what it's like to have a heartbeat? How _should_ it be said? How could he make him understand? but oh, how he loved him so, more than anything, more than his own self, more than life itself. Breathing? What breath? There was always only you.

'Then, would you die for me?' 

Mafuyu pushed his hand away. They stood for a moment, facing each other. Two human beings standing in this mess of a world. Surreal, it was like watching the scene in third person from somewhere outside his own body. Yuki found that he couldn't even say another word.

It's always going to be you and me, right?

Mafuyu brushed by him, head down. Yuki looked back just in time to see him disappear into the crowd. 

So this, Yuki thought as he gazed into the darkness, is what silence sounds like. 

The stars were spinning. Dimly, distantly, half-deliriously as they spun away from his head, Yuki realized the answer that he had been vainly grasping for all these years. 

Everyone, he believed, has a secret name. It is one that no one, not even yourself, can ever really pronounce. 

For a long time, he thought that his secret name was the small circle of darkness buried deep inside himself. For so long, it was the name of the darkness that he had been searching for. But he had been mistaken. 

Forget about the useless loneliness; forget about the shadows. Though they were all that peered back at him here in the end, they were not _him_ , they were not 'his own'. His secret name, the one that was _his_ , the name that was most precious to him out of everything in the world, was the home that was with Mafuyu; Mafuyu, who _is_ his home; the life they had together. There was nothing more essential to his being than that. It was always Mafuyu, his best friend, his lover, his soul partner, who he could never forgive himself for hurting, for bruising. 

'Then, would you...?' 

For you, my love? Anything. ~~I wish I could hold you now.~~

What, after all, is beyond this thin, faint boundary of light? Hands empty, unanchored, shall I finally find out where it beckons? It's okay for me to leave now, right? ~~But where is our goodbye?~~

If it is better for you for me to go,

.

.

.

.

.

.

_Please remember  
_ _The loveliest memories of me._  
_Already time to say “Goodbye”?_  
_I can’t find any last words to end our story._  
\---  
_Is it goodbye already?_  
_That last word is nowhere to be found._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quote at the beginning is from the song Pigeon by Cavetown, and the closing quote is from the song Hoshikuzu Venus by Aimer. Please listen to both, and listen to Hoshikuzu Venus while reading the English lyrics so we can all cry together.  
> \--  
> A few notes... 
> 
> 1\. The full complexity of Yuki’s interiority and character is and will always be an enigma. I believe very strongly that any attempt to directly capture his entire character will always fail. Of course he would have had many other aspects of his life apart from Mafuyu, many other important friendships, interests, and experiences. I only tried to capture one small, small part of the mystery that is the fascinating person of Yuki Yoshida. 
> 
> 2\. There is still much left implicit and in between the lines. There are many more details to the story, but I thought the best approach was to follow Natsuki Kizu's lead in conveying an emotion and a feeling, not a strictly logical or rational picture. This includes a form of persistent depression that I think 'fits' Yuki best. I let it remain an abstract, ambiguous condition characterized most by irrational guilt, abstract suicidal ideation, intrusive thoughts of mortality, loss, and insecurity, unstable sense of self-worth, and towards the end episodic dips in mood that can be catalyzed by the mix of stress, life events, and uncontrollable biochemical imbalances. I hope my decisions were appropriate. 
> 
> 3\. As I suggested in the notes for chapter 2, the lines between what is one's 'self' and one's depression is not always so clear. However, we must also not make the mistake of attributing everything about an individual to a mental illness. Although it is the focus of this writing, suicide and mental struggles are not the reasons that he is interesting. He is fascinating because who 'he' is, in his relationships and how he chose to live his life, surrounded by friends and surrounded by love, even in the moments when he was unaware of it.


	4. Mafuyu.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last chapter of the series. It's more of a short continuation and epilogue to chapter 3. Like Mafuyu's songs that are a way for him to communicate and find his voice, I wanted to communicate something in my heart that 'given' touched very deeply. I don't know if I truly succeeded or not, and it hurts me to sense that I will never be able to find the right words to precisely share this feeling.
> 
> What I want most for readers of 'given' to understand is that loss shapes a person's entire life. Everyone interprets and processes grief differently, but it is a scar that never disappears: it becomes part of the shape of a person's heart.. Natsuki Kizu so subtly depicts the nuances of deep loss, and I wanted to expand on that a bit further here in an impressionistic, almost dreamlike method.
> 
> Before starting to read, I invite you to play the song preview at the beginning to set the tone to the chapter. I also highly recommend listening to the full song for the fullest experience.

_“what do you think happens when we die?”  
_ _“i know that the ones who love us will miss us.”_

"Everyone has a secret name." Mafuyu found this written, in the early days of the aftermath, alongside the doodles and scribbled out lyrics in the margins of one of Yuki's thin school notebooks that had been tucked in his guitar case.

In the days and years following Yuki's death, Mafuyu knew that was his secret name; that that loss was his secret name. Not just the loss in itself, but all that the loss encompassed: the passing of his and Yuki's entire life together that slowly diminished into a reality that existed in his memory alone. And so that was a name that no one could ever really pronounce – because it's who _Mafuyu Satou_ is.

_Two people who were always together are torn apart:  
_ _That's all there is to this story._

It was that which would set the shape of the rest of his life, in both his griefs and joys alike that followed. There was the before, and then the after. The new Year 0 of his life. And except through music, he did not know how to make it understood to the people he met that 'he was not the person he was meant to be, nor the person that he started out being'. A wiser person, a stronger person, or a more warped version of himself with half-shredded roots: he never could decide which it was.

On that winter night, Mafuyu had told himself that he believed that to feel loneliness whilst being loved was to be selfish. Even though in truth, he believed nothing of the sort, in those moments he really thought he did in a rush of childish, careless outburst with edges sharpened to pierce where it was most fragile.

Confused and concerned at Yuki's distance in the previous months, it was not only that he had been busy with the band and work. Mafuyu could tell whenever they did meet that, shrouded in a nameless air of loneliness, that he was hiding something; that Yuki was increasingly troubled by something he was not sharing. But he couldn't pretend his feelings were only from pure selflessness; he could not deny that he felt he was being abandoned, left behind by his best friends, that it hurt when he thought that he did not have Yuki's trust.

That night, even seeing the struggle and desperation on Yuki's face, what Mafuyu had actually wanted to say was drowned out by what, against his will, erupted as an unfamiliar, unanticipated anger that demanded, Why can't you talk to me? Why am I not enough? Would you really be pushing me away even now if you cared about us? Really? You would do anything?

'Then, would you--'

No -- no, that was not what he had meant to say, as he so carelessly threw Yuki's words to shatter onto the ground. No, that was not it at all.

What he had meant to say, what he did not say, what he never had the time to say, was only, Please talk to me. I love you. I know; I know; I know it hurts sometimes, I know now that _I_ get hurt sometimes when I shouldn't. I know neither of us are perfect; so let us grow, let us learn together how to be human beings in this mess of a world. No matter what, I want it to always be you and me.

What he had not had the conviction to say during those winter months: I wish we could write a song together. That is, I wish we could confront your nameless shadows together. Perhaps those were the words that Yuki was unconsciously waiting for all along, but which Mafuyu did not trust in his own voice to say in his passivity. Were those the words that could have saved his life? Were those the words that would have made you stay? But that night, he just didn't say it, he just didn't know how. And in that moment of anger with all the words clamouring up inside him, all the wrong ones tumbled out like smoke, like poison.

The words, the anger and confusion between them that night would linger like a curse, carved irreversibly into time. The two of them, they had been young, so young. **They knew how to love, yet they were still learning how to live, how to speak, how to stumble.** How could they have known that those words would be eternal, their last ones together?

What Mafuyu, torn with guilt, had gone to Yuki's house two days later to say: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean what I said. I was mistaken. I was the selfish one. Let's finally write a song together, after all this time. Of course I trust you. I know that I'm not always strong, not always strong enough to trust my own voice, but let me try to be strong for you, for the both of us.

There was the before, and then there was the after.

The winter took all the sound, sucked all the noise out of Mafuyu's ears and plunged him into the silence.

What I wanted to tell you the most, I couldn't tell you the most.

.

.

.

.

.

.

**I reach for you, and you are a memory. I reach for a memory, and it's a ghost.**

_No matter where I go, you're there. You're always in my head. You're in everything I see. No matter where I go, I can still see you there, can still smell your scent. I can't forgive you. I can't forgive myself. But I want to. I miss you._

The sharp and kind memories I have hidden in my heart... These are memories I cannot return to.

You are in my every "what if". Could I have been able to stay with you? 

Yuki, can you hear me? I sing for you, but it can no longer reach you. You're already gone, and this is the world in your absence. So why does it feel like you have not yet left me completely? Is it a blessing, a spell, or some kind of curse?

_ "The hole in your heart: didn’t you notice? There’s a hole gaping inside of you. And even if this hole shrinks… It won’t ever heal." _

'There is no timeline for grief. There is no clock of how long one is meant to grieve for somebody. It takes different forms for different people and can go on for an entire lifetime.' It was a loss, a past life, a past self, that was on his mind all the time. But it was not a matter of 'letting go' or 'moving on' or other such empty platitudes. His life did move forward; he did change and embrace the gentle new sounds that surrounded him. Yet, an invisible tattoo, Yuki was simply an extension of who he was and would always be for the rest of his life. **He was in the very shape and beat of Mafuyu's heart.**

Homeland: one's native land, where someone comes from even if they leave and can never return; **their first home**. That was what Yuki was for Mafuyu: the foundation for understanding what it means to love, and be loved.

**With all that it takes and takes away, what does loss give back to us?**

Yuki had had a gift of seeing, of making people feel seen. And with seeing, it is not just about what you see, but as much about how and whether you look with a sincere attentiveness. As Mafuyu looked around himself now, it was that 'he could understand how others suffered. And however imperfectly, could acknowledge them, connect with them, and to love them deeply' through the music that remains.

In a cruel twist of irony, in the days and months after Yuki left, Mafuyu finally understood something about Yuki that he had not completely grasped before. Indeed, it was his misunderstanding that had led them to that night.

Grief is, in many ways, a lot like what people call depression: a black hole that consumes you like a slowly churning whirlpool. The spiral feels impossible to get out of, a heavy, lightless thing that dissolves who you are. There are these moments of clarity though, where we can see ourselves and feel that desire to get out strongly. It’s those moments you grasp to and find the strength to keep on trying to get out. You may never be free of it, but you keep building up ways to resist it so you can take action or get the semblance of something better than this. Even the ability to lift your head and take one step forward is a victory, however small. If there is a hand that will grasp yours to remind you which direction the dawn is, like Uenoyama had done for Mafuyu and how Mafuyu had for many years done unconsciously for Yuki, it can remind you that there is a world outside of this spiral after all.

Mafuyu finally comprehended all of this with clarity, and through his grief, understood truly Yuki's strength. And he understood what we can't see: that everyone is scared. That everyone has a different kind of spiral inside of them, some harder to escape than others.

_Hands will be let go of._ _I was scared of approaching dawn._

So when Mafuyu stumbled across a black-haired violinist crouching in the eye of a hurricane, this brilliant, exquisite artist with a fractured glass heart, he saw the hurt, he saw it clearly and truly, and he knew there was something he wanted to tell him. He knew he wanted to reach out and just say...

_Even though, I don’t want to go anywhere... inevitably, dawn will come. Hands... will be let go of._

_It's okay._

We'll be okay. That hurt, that unbearable pain – it is all okay. I can hear you. I'm listening.

How else could we live on if not for someone to hold us and tell us that it's okay for a human heart to hurt? How else, if not for someone to say, I see your pain, and I accept it all. To say, as Uenoyama did to Mafuyu, that I see you, and I am here, and we will be okay: Even on the days when the grief comes and has its way with you, and carves you out in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day, or the middle of a conversation, even years and years afterwards.

The story of two people torn apart. The story of four who became three. The story of the three that remain. The story of one who is gone but never absent.

Are we being proper human beings like this, with such strangeness in our hearts that we can love even with loss imprinted in the shape of our souls, the patterns of our veins? – Yet, how could we not be? When the pain grows dimmer into a dull ache and finally unwraps its clutch across your throat and lungs, you can learn again to love truly, to listen closely to the music and all its drifting, ghostly echoes. 

Meetings and partings; joys and sadness; promises made and broken; hands held and let go of; love and its shadows; whether saved or unforgivable; whether or not you want to forget, this is all that we are given. 

All we can do is to hold on so tightly to these gifts left for us. Don't run; don't turn away. Make them glow, hold them close, now and forever onwards, because every day still breathing is a miracle. Of all the things left behind, they’re all that we need to hear the sounds of new dawns humming with these ghosts. Hear the new sounds that are his gift, offered forth with the memory and absence of that warm embrace, that quiet and deafening song.

**Where is the end of love?** **Not until the planet stops spinning and time itself reaches its end would such a place be found.** Yuki and Mafuyu had been a law unto themselves: a love that does not die as bodies do.

So we sing, and sing, and sing aloud for each other; in unbearable pain, in impossible joy. Sing it, scream it, shout and shout and shout it ever louder so that, somehow he can hear, these songs and shouts ever in rhythm with the echoes of his love, his life, that will sing us to the end of time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it was too ambiguous, the first-person plural + second person in the last section was meant to reflect Mafuyu, Hiiragi, and Shizusumi's voices collectively.
> 
> In this chapter/epilogue, some lines/concepts interweave quotes from various interviews and lyrics, most of all the one between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper, who talk about how, 40+ years after losing their fathers and brother(s), not a day goes by when they're not thinking of that loss. Watching these on Youtube profoundly helped me better understand the reality of Mafuyu's grief and strength. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this topic.
> 
> The title of this series is derived from the song "Dance me to the end of love" covered by The Civil Wars. Their voices capture the haunting longing and sense of ghostly timelessness that I felt resonated very much with Mafuyuki. You can listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0LZ4wMV3zw 
> 
> I am grateful to anyone who has read to the end, even if it was only one person. Please consider writing me a comment if you've made it all the way here :) 
> 
> I would appreciate if you share this short series if it touched you in any way.
> 
> This was a real journey for me to write, and I hope it was a worthwhile journey for you reading. Thank you ^-^


End file.
